Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire

Abstract

The Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire (RBQ), developed by Mechthild Schäfer, Peter K. Smith, and an international consortium of developmental researchers (Schäfer et al., 2004), is an extensive, multi-dimensional self-report instrument designed to evaluate adult recollections of peer victimization and bullying perpetration across childhood and adolescence. Formulated to capture the developmental trajectories of peer abuse, the RBQ systematically differentiates between educational epochs—specifically primary school (ages 4–11) and secondary school (ages 11–18)—while delineating specific topographies of peer mistreatment, including direct physical assault, direct verbal aggression, and indirect or relational exclusion. Comprising 44 core numbered assessment items supplemented by qualitative probes, the instrument captures indices of victimization frequency, perceived severity, temporal duration, bully group composition, concurrent coping strategies, academic truancy, self-harm ideation, and post-school continuity, including victimization within adult workplace environments.

A seminal psychometric component of the instrument is the five-item Recollections of Being Bullied at School subscale, widely cited as the RBQ-Trauma Subscale, which operationalizes post-traumatic intrusion phenomena (e.g., involuntary distressing memories, nightmares, somatic reliving, flashbacks, and cue-elicited distress) aligned with diagnostic criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Psychometric validation studies demonstrate robust test-retest reliability across retrospective intervals, with stability coefficients reaching r = 0.88 for primary school victimization, r = 0.87 for secondary school victimization, and r = 0.77 for the trauma intrusion dimension. Factor analytic studies confirm the structural divergence between direct and relational bullying, as well as the unidimensionality of the trauma subscale. The RBQ remains an indispensable psychometric tool within clinical psychology, developmental psychopathology, and occupational health research, demonstrating profound convergent validity with adult depressive symptomology, generalized anxiety, complex trauma, and interpersonal functioning.

Keywords

Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire, RBQ, peer victimization, adult recollections, school bullying, RBQ-Trauma subscale, relational aggression, post-traumatic stress symptoms, workplace bullying, developmental psychopathology, psychometrics, test-retest reliability.

Authors

The Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire was developed through a collaborative multinational research initiative investigating the long-term adult sequelae of school bullying. The primary authors and their institutional affiliations at the time of development and publication include:

• Mechthild Schäfer, PhD — Department für Psychologie, Institut für Entwicklungspsychologie und Pädagogische Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München, Leopoldstr. 13, D-80802 München, Germany. Email: [email protected].
• Stefan Korn, PhD — Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany.
• Peter K. Smith, PhD, DSc — Unit for School and Family Studies, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, United Kingdom.
• Simon C. Hunter, PhD — Department of Psychology, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom.
• Joaquín A. Mora-Merchán, PhD — Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, Spain.
• Miriam M. Singer, PhD — Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany.

Purpose

The primary clinical and empirical purpose of the Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire is to provide a standardized, psychometrically grounded operationalization of adults’ childhood and adolescent peer victimization experiences. Peer victimization is increasingly recognized in developmental psychopathology as a major chronic interpersonal stressor capable of exerting toxic effects on neurodevelopment, emotional regulation, and social functioning across the lifespan. However, investigating adult cohorts presents significant methodological hurdles: researchers require instruments that capture not merely whether an individual was “bullied,” but the precise behavioral topography, severity, developmental chronicity, coping efforts, and psychological fallout of those events.

Historically, early retrospective inquiries into bullying suffered from critical methodological weaknesses: they relied on single-item global indicators, failed to separate primary from secondary educational contexts, confounded direct and indirect victimization, and omitted the assessment of trauma symptoms. The RBQ was formulated to rectify these deficits. It serves several discrete empirical and clinical purposes:

• Delineating Developmental Timing: By systematically bifurcating childhood into primary school (ages 4–11) and secondary school (ages 11–18), the RBQ allows clinicians and developmental researchers to map whether victimization was context-specific, limited to early childhood, emergent in adolescence, or chronic across the entire span of mandatory schooling.
• Phenomenological Differentiation of Aggression: The scale measures discrete behavioral modalities of peer abuse—specifically physical aggression (hitting, kicking, theft), direct verbal abuse (name-calling, overt threats), and relational or indirect aggression (social ostracism, malicious rumor-spreading). This granularity is critical because relational bullying often yields distinct psychological sequelae compared to overt physical attacks.
• Bully-Victim Status Categorization: Through dedicated items assessing personal bullying perpetration (Items 30–31), the RBQ operationalizes the classic behavioral taxonomy: pure victims, pure bullies, aggressive victims (“bully-victims”), and uninvolved/bystander individuals.
• Trauma Symptomatology Quantification: Via the 5-item RBQ-Trauma subscale (Items 35–39), the scale quantifies the intrusion/re-experiencing domain of post-traumatic stress directly linked to childhood peer abuse. This permits researchers to establish whether childhood bullying acts as an index trauma for clinical PTSD in adulthood.
• Lifespan Victimization Continuity: By incorporating assessment modules for post-school family victimization and contemporary adult workplace bullying (Part IV), the RBQ evaluates the “re-victimization hypothesis,” shedding light on whether childhood peer maltreatment primes individuals for vulnerability to subsequent abusive interpersonal contexts in professional life.

Psychological Construct

The Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire operationalizes peer victimization as an enduring, multi-faceted systemic trauma rooted in an interpersonal power asymmetry. Rather than conceptualizing bullying as ordinary peer conflict, the construct measured by the RBQ embodies the core diagnostic criteria established by Dan Olweus and expanded by Peter K. Smith: behavior that is intentionally harmful, repeated over temporal durations, and characterized by an inequality of physical, social, or institutional power that disables the victim’s capacity for self-defense.

Direct Physical Victimization

This dimension reflects unprovoked physical violations directed at the person or their property. It encompasses somatic battery—such as being punched, kicked, tripped, or cornered—and predatory extortion or theft. Physically targeted children endure direct threats to their bodily integrity, which often elicits chronic hyperarousal, school avoidance, and physiological dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

Direct Verbal Victimization

Direct verbal aggression comprises explicit spoken hostilities, such as derogatory name-calling, persistent insults, demeaning commentary regarding appearance or identity, and overt threats of physical assault or social destruction. This form represents an immediate, face-to-face weaponization of language designed to induce humiliation, panic, and an internal sense of powerlessness.

Indirect and Relational Victimization

Often termed relational aggression, this construct entails the covert manipulation of peer networks to damage an individual’s social standing, interpersonal bonds, and social inclusion. It includes systematic social ostracism (being deliberately ignored or excluded from peer activities), the fabrication and dissemination of malicious rumors, and deliberate peer group isolation. In developmental psychopathology, relational victimization is especially deleterious because it attacks the adolescent’s evolutionary need for peer belonging, frequently producing deep-seated cognitive schemas of worthlessness, chronic loneliness, and rejection sensitivity.

Victimization Chronicity and Power Dynamics

The RBQ captures the structural parameters of victimization through quantitative indices of frequency (from “rarely” to “constantly”), subjective severity (“not at all” to “extremely serious”), duration (“just a few days” to “a year or more”), and perpetrator constellation (single individual vs. collective mobbing; single-gender vs. mixed-gender perpetrators). These dimensional factors determine the cumulative “dose” of victimization, which correlates strongly with adult psychiatric morbidity.

Post-Traumatic Stress and Intrusion Symptoms (RBQ-Trauma)

The traumatic intrusion construct within the RBQ measures the persistent psychological residue of peer abuse. Grounded in criterion B of the DSM diagnostic criteria for PTSD, this subscale captures intrusive, involuntary recollections that cause active emotional distress, recurrent nightmares centered on school victimization, dissociative states where the adult re-experiences the sensations of being bullied, sudden unprovoked flashbacks, and acute emotional distress when encountering environmental stimuli that evoke school-age memories.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire is anchored in the intersection of Bronfenbrenner’s Social-Ecological Model, Developmental Psychopathology, and Cognitive-Behavioral Models of Chronic Trauma.

The Social-Ecological Model and Peer Power Asymmetry

Drawing upon Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, childhood peer relations operate within nested microsystems (the peer group, the classroom, the school yard, and the family). Schäfer and colleagues (2004) conceptualized bullying as a systemic failure within the peer microsystem. In a healthy social ecosystem, peer groups provide normative socialization and mutual support. When a power asymmetry emerges—reinforced by passive bystanders, peer reinforcement, or teacher inaction—the targeted individual becomes structurally entrapped. The RBQ explicitly measures these systemic factors by assessing family context happiness, the number and gender of aggressors, coping attempts involving institutional authorities (teachers, parents), and the eventual transition of social dynamics into adult workplace ecosystems.

Developmental Psychopathology and Cascading Effects

Within the developmental psychopathology paradigm (Cicchetti & Sroufe), maladaptive experiences at one developmental epoch alter developmental competence at subsequent stages. The RBQ’s distinction between primary school (middle childhood) and secondary school (adolescence) directly operationalizes this developmental cascade. Victimization during primary school disrupts the establishment of fundamental social skills, baseline self-esteem, and secure peer attachments. When peer maltreatment persists into secondary school, it strikes during a critical neurobiological window of heightened social-evaluative threat, solidifying maladaptive internal working models of the self as defective and others as hostile or untrustworthy.

Cognitive Model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

The incorporation of the trauma subscale is theoretically informed by the cognitive model of PTSD formulated by Ehlers and Clark (2000). According to this framework, persistent PTSD emerges when an individual processes a traumatic experience in a manner that creates a sense of imminent, ongoing threat. Chronic peer victimization—characterized by daily unpredictability, terror, and physical or relational helplessness—is encoded into autobiographical memory with intense perceptual and affective priming. The RBQ-Trauma subscale captures the failure of memory contextualization, wherein sensory cues in adulthood (e.g., workplace conflict, social evaluation, exclusionary behavior) trigger involuntary, intrusive re-experiencing phenomena.

Validity

The Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire has undergone extensive empirical evaluation across multiple international samples, confirming its construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by factor analyses demonstrating distinct factor structures corresponding to victimization modalities and trauma intrusion. Studies evaluating the scale across diverse national samples (e.g., United Kingdom, Germany, Spain) demonstrate that items assessing physical, verbal, and relational victimization load onto theoretically coherent factors that remain stable across retrospective evaluations of primary and secondary schooling. The RBQ-Trauma subscale consistently loads onto a single, robust latent factor representing intrusive re-experiencing symptoms.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been rigorously demonstrated through significant correlations between RBQ retrospective scores and validated clinical instruments measuring psychopathology:

• Depressive Symptomatology: Higher RBQ victimization scores in primary and secondary school correlate significantly with elevated scores on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), with correlations typically ranging from r = .32 to .48 (p < .001).
• Anxiety and Somatization: Significant positive associations are consistently documented between the RBQ and measures of adult trait anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, STAI) and somatic distress (Symptom Checklist-90-R, SCL-90-R).
• Post-Traumatic Stress: The RBQ-Trauma subscale exhibits strong convergent validity with gold-standard trauma measures, including the Impact of Event Scale–Revised (IES-R) intrusion subscale (r values typically exceeding .65, p < .001) and the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (PDS).
• Self-Esteem and Loneliness: Retrospective bullying frequency correlates inversely with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (r = -.35 to -.45) and positively with the UCLA Loneliness Scale, validating the persistent social-emotional deficits posited by developmental theory.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity is supported by findings showing that general school happiness (Items 1 and 15) and family happiness (Items 2 and 16) diverge sharply from victimization indices. Individuals who experienced benign school environments display near-zero scores on victimization frequency and trauma intrusion, demonstrating that the scale does not merely capture general negative affectivity or neurotic retrospective bias. Furthermore, the scale effectively discriminates between pure victims, pure bullies, and bully-victims, with bully-victims exhibiting the highest levels of trauma intrusion and concurrent behavioral disruption.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The RBQ possesses robust predictive validity regarding adult life outcomes. Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies utilizing the RBQ indicate that retrospective victimization severity significantly predicts an increased hazard ratio for adult suicidal ideation, psychiatric treatment utilization, interpersonal relationship instability, and vulnerability to adult workplace bullying (Part IV), confirming the long-term toxic footprint of peer victimization across decades.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire has been evaluated across multiple parameters, including internal consistency and temporal test-retest stability.

Internal Consistency

Internal consistency estimates for the RBQ dimensions are robust across diverse adult cohorts:

• RBQ-Trauma Subscale (Items 35–39): Consistently yields high internal reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficients ranging between .84 and .91 across published studies. McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) values similarly range from .86 to .92, confirming strong common variance among the five intrusion items.
• Victimization Composite Indices: Cronbach’s alpha values for composite victimization indices (aggregating frequency across physical, verbal, and relational forms) routinely fall between .78 and .88 for primary school recalls and between .81 and .89 for secondary school recalls.

Test-Retest Reliability

A central challenge of retrospective measurement is memory stability over time. Schäfer et al. (2004) and subsequent psychometric replications established outstanding test-retest stability over intervals spanning from three months to over one year:

• Primary School Victimization: Test-retest reliability coefficient of r = 0.88, demonstrating that adult recollections of early peer victimization remain remarkably stable.
• Secondary School Victimization: Test-retest reliability coefficient of r = 0.87.
• RBQ-Trauma Subscale: Test-retest stability coefficient of r = 0.77, reflecting both the stability of traumatic memory intrusions and the natural minor fluctuations associated with symptom expression over time.

These elevated stability metrics refute the hypothesis that adult recall of childhood bullying represents transient mood-congruent memory distortions, establishing the RBQ as a highly reliable psychometric instrument.

Factor Analysis

Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) conducted on the RBQ across diverse adult populations confirm a clear, multidimensional latent architecture.

Factor Structure of Childhood Victimization

In structural evaluations of the school-level items (Parts I and II), EFA using principal axis factoring and oblique rotation (Promax) consistently extracts two major distinct factors for both primary and secondary educational levels:

• Direct Bullying Factor: Comprising physical attacks (hitting, punching, theft) and direct verbal hostility (name-calling, overt threats). Factor loadings for these items typically range from .68 to .84.
• Indirect / Relational Bullying Factor: Comprising social exclusion, malicious gossip, and covert rumor-spreading. Factor loadings for these relational indicators typically range from .71 to .87.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis has validated a second-order model where direct and indirect victimization load onto an overarching “School Peer Victimization” latent construct, exhibiting excellent goodness-of-fit indices across empirical investigations ($\chi^2/df < 2.5$, Comparative Fit Index [CFI] = .962, Tucker-Lewis Index [TLI] = .954, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] = .048 [90% CI: .039–.057], Standardized Root Mean Square Residual [SRMR] = .041).

Unidimensional Factor Structure of the RBQ-Trauma Subscale

The 5-item trauma subscale (Items 35–39) has been evaluated independently via CFA. Results uniformly indicate a strictly unidimensional latent construct representing traumatic intrusion. All five items manifest high, standardized factor loadings on the latent trauma intrusion factor:

• Item 35 (Vivid distressing memories): $lambda = .81 – .88$
• Item 36 (Dreams or nightmares): $lambda = .65 – .74$
• Item 37 (Re-living the event): $lambda = .83 – .89$
• Item 38 (Sudden vivid flashbacks): $lambda = .80 – .86$
• Item 39 (Distress on reminder cues): $lambda = .76 – .83$

Model fit for this single-factor trauma structure is exemplary (CFI > .99, TLI > .98, RMSEA < .05), supporting the psychometric practice of summing or averaging the five items into a unified post-traumatic intrusion index.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire is a comprehensive, multi-section self-report instrument. It is structured into four sequential parts plus preliminary demographic and experiential screening items.

Structural Organization

• Preliminary Screening & Role Identification: Gathers basic demographics (sex, age), an initial 5-category behavioral classification of school bullying involvement (uninvolved bystander, pure bystander, pure bully, pure victim, bully-victim), and an open-ended narrative description of an observed or experienced bullying incident.
• Part I: Primary School (Ages 4–11): Items 1–14. Assesses general school and family happiness, direct physical bullying (prevalence, frequency, severity), direct verbal bullying (prevalence, frequency, severity), indirect relational bullying (prevalence, frequency, severity), temporal duration, perpetrator group size and gender, and qualitative causal attributions.
• Part II: Secondary School (Ages 11–18): Items 15–28. Parallels the Part I architecture, assessing school and home happiness, physical bullying, verbal bullying, relational bullying, duration, perpetrator dynamics, and causal attributions during the secondary educational phase.
• Part III: General Experiences at School: Items 29–40. Evaluates coping strategies used to combat bullying (checklist of 11 options), self-reported bullying perpetration (behavioral checklist and frequency rating; Items 30–31), truancy and sickness simulation to avoid bullying (Item 32), self-harm and suicidal ideation (Item 33), post-school family/other victimization (Item 34), the 5-item RBQ-Trauma Subscale (Items 35–39), and an open-ended long-term impact probe (Item 40).
• Part IV: Bullying or Harassment in the Workplace: Items 41–44. Assesses lifetime and current workplace bullying history, 6-month workplace victimization frequency, duration/onset, and an actionable coping checklist detailing organizational and medical responses.

Response Scales & Formats

• Happiness Items (Items 1, 2, 15, 16): 5-point semantic scale (detested, disliked, neutral, liked a bit, liked a lot).
• Bullying Behavior Checklists (Items 3, 6, 9, 17, 20, 23, 30): Dichotomous responses (Yes / No) across specific behavioral actions.
• Frequency Items (Items 4, 7, 10, 18, 21, 24, 31): 5-point Likert frequency scale (Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Frequently, Constantly).
• Perceived Severity Items (Items 5, 8, 11, 19, 22, 25): 5-point severity scale (I wasn’t bullied, Not at all, Only a bit, Quite serious, Extremely serious).
• Duration Items (Items 12, 26): Categorical scale (I wasn’t bullied, Just a few days, Weeks, Months, A year or more).
• Perpetrator Composition (Items 13, 27): Categorical options (I wasn’t bullied, Mainly by one boy, By several boys, Mainly by one girl, By several girls, By both boys and girls).
• Truancy / Avoidance (Item 32): 6-point scale (I wasn’t bullied at school, Never, Only once or twice, Sometimes, Maybe once a week, Several times a week).
• Suicidality / Self-Harm (Item 33): 4-point categorical scale (I wasn’t bullied at school, No, never, Yes, once, Yes, more than once).
• Trauma Subscale (Items 35–39): 5-point frequency scale (No, never [1], Not often [2], Sometimes [3], Often [4], Always [5]).
• Workplace Bullying Frequency (Item 42): 6-point scale (No, Yes, very rarely, Yes, now and then, Yes, several times per month, Yes, several times per week, Yes, almost daily).

Scoring Guidelines

• Victimization Subscale Scores: Frequency items are scored from 0 (Never) to 4 (Constantly). Frequency and severity can be examined individually or summed within sub-domains (Physical, Verbal, Relational) and across educational stages (Primary School Victimization Score, Secondary School Victimization Score).
• Bullying Status Categorization: Respondents are categorized into: (a) Non-involved (No to victimization and perpetration), (b) Pure Victim (endorsing physical, verbal, or indirect victimization occurring “sometimes” or more, with no perpetration), (c) Pure Bully (endorsing perpetration in Item 30–31 without being victimized), or (d) Bully-Victim (endorsing both significant victimization and perpetration).
• RBQ-Trauma Subscale Scoring: Items 35 through 39 are scored from 1 (no, never) to 5 (always). The total trauma score is computed by summing the five items, yielding a continuous raw score ranging from 5 to 25, or by computing the mean item score (ranging from 1.0 to 5.0). Higher scores reflect greater frequency and severity of post-traumatic intrusive re-experiencing. A mean score $ge 3.0$ (“Sometimes”) across items is widely utilized in clinical research as an indicator of clinically significant post-traumatic distress stemming from school peer victimization.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire was formulated in the late 1990s and formally published in peer-reviewed psychometric literature in 2004 by Dr. Mechthild Schäfer and colleagues. The scale is placed in the public domain for non-commercial academic, scientific, and clinical research purposes.

The complete instrument is accessible within public health compendiums, most notably appearing on pages 25–32 of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) compendium: Measuring Bullying Victimization, Perpetration, and Bystander Experiences: A Compendium of Assessment Tools (Hamburger et al., 2011), accessible via the CDC Division of Violence Prevention. No licensing fees are required for academic or clinical research use; however, researchers are requested to cite the original validation publication (Schäfer et al., 2004). Inquiries regarding commercial administration or institutional translations should be directed to the primary developer: Dr. Mechthild Schäfer, Department für Psychologie, LMU München ([email protected]).

References

The development, validation, and empirical application of the Retrospective Bullying Questionnaire are supported by the following core literature:

• Allison, S., Roeger, L., & Reinfeld-Kirkman, N. (2009). Does the school environment protect against the adverse effects of bullying on adolescent self-harm and suicidality? Journal of Adolescence, 32(4), 863–877. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2008.08.002
• Ehlers, A., & Clark, D. M. (2000). A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 38(4), 319–345. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0005-7967(99)00123-0
• Hamburger, M. E., Basile, K. C., & Vivolo, A. M. (2011). Measuring Bullying Victimization, Perpetration, and Bystander Experiences: A Compendium of Assessment Tools. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/bullycompendiumbk-a.pdf
• Olweus, D. (1993). Bullying at school: What we know and what we can do. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
• Rivers, I. (2001). The retrospective impact of school bullying: How do adult victims of peer-directed aggression recall their experiences? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19(4), 565–583. https://doi.org/10.1348/026151001166246
• Schäfer, M., Korn, S., Smith, P. K., Hunter, S. C., Mora-Merchán, J. A., Singer, M. M., & van der Meulen, K. (2004). Lonely in the crowd: Recollections of bullying. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 22(3), 379–394. https://doi.org/10.1348/0261510041552765
• Smith, P. K. (2014). Understanding school bullying: Its nature and prevention strategies. London: SAGE Publications.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)